Bianca Bosker’s Get the Picture is a fascinating and hilarious memoir set in the New York art scene.
“[Bosker] has written a dark comedy of manners, and what she exposes here might be a new kind of country club mentality, where the cultural elite can no longer exclude people based on race, gender or sexual identity, so they come up with clever new ways to build moats around their little castles. . . . Get the Picture is one of the funniest books I’ve read about New York’s contemporary art scene . . . Brilliant.”
I have a reputation among my friends for listening to techno music that has all the charm of a fork stuck in a garbage disposal, but the good news for you is that working on GET THE PICTURE significantly expanded my taste—in music, in art, in everything. The book grew out of the years I spent selling art at galleries, working in artists’ studios, patrolling museum wings as a security guard, and more—all as part of a journey to understand why art matters and how any of us can engage with it more deeply. As a big believer in learning by doing, I loved getting to immerse myself in the nerve center of the fine art world and I hope this playlist will take you one step further to feeling like you were right there in the room with me. Whether I was stretching canvases in a painter’s studio or getting sat on by a nearly-naked stranger in the nap of art, there was always music playing. Ready? Turn up the volume. Let’s go.
“Shoot Your Shot,” Divine
This isn’t a song, it’s an anthem. And it’s not melodic, it’s possessed—it’s basically six minutes of the same lyric over and over again: “Don’t never stop doin’ what you doin’/Don’t stop, shoot your shot.” The frenzy of the song always puts in mind of the passion that art lovers—and especially artists—bring to what they do.
For much of my adult life, art and I weren’t on speaking terms. I felt like when it came to art, I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t belong. But when I started poking around the art world, curious to learn more, the people I met fascinated me. They treated paintings like they were as necessary as vital organs. They maxed out credit cards to show hunks of metal they swore could change the world. I’d never met a group of people willing to sacrifice so much for something of so little obvious practical value, and their dedication—which this song’s feverish intensity makes me think of—made me worry that my turning my back on art I was missing out on something major. So I decided to throw myself in.
“Get Back,” The Beatles
I’ve done reporting in China, which is a tough place for journalists, and yet nothing prepared me for how secretive the art world would be. I began reaching out to people, trying to get art experts to talk to me, and instead of answers, I got threats. Warnings. Many, many, many closed doors—plus lots of lectures about all the things wrong with my clothes and “overly-enthusiastic” personality. This Beatles tune nicely captures the general attitude I encountered at first: “Get back. GET BACK.” It also has a tires-speeding-along-the-asphalt propulsion feels just right for setting out on a journey. The more people told me to stay away from the art world, the more determined I was to get inside, then share what I learned.
“Mi Mujer,” Nicolas Jaar
My first gig in the art world was at an up-and-coming gallery in Brooklyn—an out-of-the-way place for the in-the-know where we’d work late into the night, spackling, sanding, vacuuming dust, while blasting music through the gallery. The gallerist I worked for played everything from Travis Scott to Erik Satie, but I’ve picked Nicolas Jaar because 1. I’m obsessed with his music and 2. His music reminds me a lot of contemporary art. It’s not always all that comfortable. It can be vaguely unpleasant. As I worked to develop my “eye” and what art connoisseurs call “visual literacy,” artists kept encouraging me to lean in to discomfort. “Beauty” is a dirty word in the art world these days, but I came to think it’s also essential. Art can help us find beauty where we never recognized it before. In discomfort, for example.
“You Want It Darker” by Leonard Cohen
The Brooklyn gallery where I worked mounted an art exhibit that borrowed its name from the title of this song, and as a result I remember us listening to this tune quite a lot while the show was going up. The song is also a very accurate reflection of my emotional state at that particular time. “We kill the flame,” Cohen growls in the chorus, and I knew the feeling. I was being initiated into all the ways the art world wields strategic snobbery to build mystique, from the made-up language of artspeak (“indexical marks of the artist’s body” is finger painting to you and me) to the way galleries judge you even more than you judge the art. (My “uncoolness” was apparently a liability to my boss.) I thought about slinking away from the art world yet again. But then I started to hear about Miami.
“Scarface (Push It To The Limit)” by Paul Engemann
Listening to this song is the musical equivalent of doing a fat line of cocaine, which is basically what it feels like to go Art Basel Miami Beach. Nonstop. For a week. Working at the gallery in Brooklyn got me up close and personal with the “pure” side of the art world—which is made up of people who generally value “fuck-you art” over what they rather contemptuously refer to as “couch art” (a.k.a. colorful painting). But having experienced the pure, I started to get curious about the puerile, which is how I ended up joining a different gallery to sell art to the rich, famous, and inebriated during Art Basel Miami, a weeklong bacchanal of parties, pills, and powders held in the name of shopping for art. “Push it to the limit” is basically the motto during Art Basel Miami, and this song is every bit as intense as being there. Also, given that I ended up selling an artwork from the backseat of an Escalade in South Beach while people around me hroonfedup lines of cocaine—well, it’s fitting that this is the theme song to the movie Scarface.
“Innerbloom” by Rüfüs du Sol
If you read GET THE PICTURE and want to know what it was like working alongside Elizabeth and Rob at Denny Dimin gallery, where my wheeling and dealing in Miami got promoted to role of “assistant director,” the answer is: Rob and I played this song on repeat, constantly, at very high volume. Elizabeth should have murdered us.
“Dance (A$$) Remix,” by Big Sean and Nicki Minaj
I first met Mandy AllFIRE when she sat on my face. AllFIRE, a performance artist with serious chops, had spent years performing as an ass influencer on Instagram, where fetishy close-ups of her butt had attracted nearly 300,000 followers whom she’d invited to her gallery for a “live face-sitting event.” Her solo show took its name from a line of this song—”Kiss my ass and my anus, ‘cause it’s finally famous”—and I can’t remember whether this exact song was playing during AllFIRE’s smothering event, but its chorus (“Ass ass ass ass ass/Ass ass ass ass ass ass ass ass…” you get the idea) is a fairly accurate reflection of my nonsensical inner monologue at the time. I didn’t know what to make of her work. It ended up completely upsetting my definition of art. And in the process, I started to see art everywhere.
“Voyage, Voyage” by Desireless
I started working as a studio assistant for the artist Julie Curtiss and it was in her studio, during the life-altering experience that was working beside her, that this song inextricably embedded itself in my brain. I remember Julie sprinting over to her computer to crank up this song when it came on her playlist. I became obsessed with it. To me, this song is forever linked with a period in my life where, thanks to Julie, I felt my relationship with art, with looking, undergo a seismic shift. My taste changed. My relationship to reality changed. My life changed.
This song also sent me on a longgggg, deep obsession with synthpop. DM me (@bbosker) if you want those playlists.
“For—Peter—Toilet Brush,” by Nils Frahm
Okay, look, I’m crazy about Nils Frahm’s music. I listened to it compulsively while writing my manuscript (see the album: Tripping in Berlin), but really I’m including him here because Frahm’s approach to making music has a strong kinship with how I came to understand art’s role in our lives. Frahm makes incredibly haunting, bewitching melodies out of all sorts of instruments and non-instruments, from rubbing his wet finger on spinning glasses to pounding on a piano with a toilet brush. (You’ll hear the latter in this track.) Art, I came to see, helps us fight the reducing tendencies of our minds. Our brains are essentially trash compactors, constantly compressing the information coming in. But art—like dreams—introduces pleasurable, powerful glitches that keep our brains nimble and open to new experiences. The glitch that art introduces to our brains is a gift, one that can help us savor, with fresh eyes, the world’s beauty, chaos, and nuance. And discover the beauty that exists in hammering on piano strings with a toilet brush.
“Deía—AVEM Remix,” by Mira
I write while listening to some of the most aggressive electronic music the internet has to offer. I love the speed of techno: It has a propulsive quality that carries you along and shoots energy all the way through your toes, which is exactly what I want my sentences on the page to do. I want you to feel like you’re listening to me tell a story with breathless excitement—because that really is how I feel about my topics—and I want my words to move you along at a cadence of at least 120 beats per minute, like this song. I want you, the reader, to feel that thrum when you read GET THE PICTURE. I want the stories inside to carry you deeper into our world.
Bianca Bosker is an award-winning journalist and the author of Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste.
She’s the former executive tech editor of the Huffington Post, where she explored technology’s influence on culture through subjects such as teen Vine stars, people who date video games, and the creators of Siri. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, T (the New York Times style magazine), Food & Wine, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and The New Republic, as well as The New Yorker online. She is the author of the acclaimed academic book Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China. She lives in New York City.